Monday, March 30, 2015

samuel johnson, marcel mauss, and an old crone

Circumstances alter

definitions. Of course, not only
circumstances impinge on the career of a definition; nor is it always clear
where a circumstance ends and another begins. But – for instance –to argue
about Samuel Johnson’s political beliefs in the idiom of our own era’s
political terms is surely to risk obscuring what Johnson thought, even if it does satisfy some desire to create
a totemic line of thinkers neatly coming down to us. Which, talk about your
enormous condescension!

Thus, though Johnson was obviously on the “right” during his
time, and was even suspected of being a crypto Stuart supporter, his conservativism
is obviously not ours. This comes out in his defense of hierarchy, or the “enormous
pyramid of subordination”, as he darkly put it, in Rambler 145, clearly written
in a spirit to counter the gathering ideology of utilitarianism that has since
made every man his own alienator and reduces any person who thinks to quiet moments
of despair. Johnson strikes a note that is surprisingly similar to a theme
sounded in Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur le
don about exchange in “archaic” societies, where the gift and the spirit of
power define the highest level of existence, while utility – and all questions
pertaining to the useful – are put on a second, lower level.

“It is allowed that vocations and employmnets of least
dignty are of the most apparent use; that the meanest artisan or manufacturer
contributes more to the accommodation of life, than the profound scholar and
argumentative theorist; and that the publick would suffer less present
inconvenience from the banishment of philosophers than from the extinction of
any common trade.” The terms with with Johnson begins clearly turn on an
opposition between dignity and use, philosophy and trade, and the social
hierarchy that backs this placing of upper and lower.

The Johnson that we know from Boswell is an established
figure – but we know that the Johnson who, in his younger days, sometimes
rambled at night for want of a place to sleep, was far from established. It
takes a while for the reader to see that the sometimes elephantine prose of
Johnson, his massiveness, is shot through with an undeniable whiff of the street.
This essay, which could have taken off in a sort of rococo defense of the best
and the brightest, instead encounters the street in the form of complaint
against a society that doesn’t honor those who do the most to make it work –
those who, as Adam Smith put it later (even as he was shifting the terms by
which this society explained itself), did ‘productive labor.’ A complex phrase
that haunted the political economy of the nineteenth century and was submerged
in the twentieth, where it now exists as a kind of economic populism, a railing
ghost. On the streets of London in the eghteenth century – as, indeed, on the
streets of Santa Monica in 2015 – one finds both archaic forms of thinking and
utopian criticism of the monsters of rationalisation that keep the majority
down.

“Some have been so forcibly struck with this observation,
that they have, in the first warmth of their discovery, thought it reasonable
to alter the common distribution of dignity, and venturedd to condemn mankind of universal ingratitude. For justice
exacts, that those by whom we are most benefited should be most honored. And
what labour can be more useful than that which procures to families and
communties those necessaries which supply the wants of nature, or those
conveniencies by which ease, security, and elegance are conferred?”

This idea is as alive today, on the street, as it was then.
Who has not, when young at least, had conversations in which dream societies
were proposed that would pay the garbageman more than the CEO? Indeed, I am not
so far from that opinion myself. However, Johnson’s putting of the case already
gives us a vision of what makes it unconfortable: the notion of elegance and
the conveniences of life – of consumption. For the notion that the producer
rates a higher dignity than the consumer – which, at its root, displaces the
honor of the creator to its human prototypes – isn’t an a priori or universal
truth. It does contain enough prejudicial force, however, that even in the
vastly changed circumstances of capitalsm, the manager, the symbol pusher,
still grasp for the role of producer, and throw the rest into the status of
parasites – of, to use the immortal words of the private equity mogul, Romney
himself, taker. Circumstances adjust definitions, but definitions store, like
an archve, earlier circumstances.

Last week, I was drinking coffee at a Coffee Bean on Santa
Monica Boulevard when I was approached by a beggar. This woman would have
delighted Yeats. Her fingers were no longer filthy – they were lacquered with old
filth, they had a sort of patina. She asked for a dollar, offered me a cig, sat
down and began to sigh that she was bored. I’m sixty two, she said, and if I
ever get rich, I’ll never be bored again. If you are poor, what do you got?
Last night she didn’t have television,nor anybody to talk to, and she was
bored. Which, she said, was a not unusual condition. I asked her whether she
really thought that the rich were not ever bored, and she said that of course
they weren’t. They could go out to movies every night! They could put a tv in
every room, which she would do, if she was rich.

Now, this image of the rich is different, and yet not
different, from the image of the rich as “producers”. After all, to go too far
down the road that the rich produce is to embed the rich in a social function,
having social benefits. It is hard to sidestep this, even if one presses the
key of freedom over and over again – the current way of blocking the path to a
discussion of ultimate social ends.

Johnson, more than me, would have recognized in the old
woman’s talk something of what he thought, pragmatically, about dignity and
ease. He has a wonderful way of moving from granting the workers – in his time,
the agricultural worker – their place to putting that place in terms of the
universe of higher values, the values of the sage and hero: [the workers] who,
after all the consessions which truth may extort in favour of their occupation,
must be content to fill up the lowest class of the commonwealth, to form the
base of the pyramid of subordination, and lie buried in obscurity themselves,
while they support all that is splendid, conspicuous, or exalted.”

This is burial indeed. There is something gothic about thes
phrases, as if Johnson were speaking of a zombie proletariat, an undead, a host
of shadows busy supporting all that is splendid by doing all that is obscure. Another whiff of the street: clearly, this distribution
of places is profane. What is spendid, conspicuous or exalted is still of this
world.

So far the street reaches. But Johnson’s Toryism has a reply
prepared, contrasting intellectual labour to manual labour, to the
disadvantage, both socially, in terms of remuneration, and morally, in terms of
dignity, of the latter.

There is a twist, though. If dignity has any meaning, it can’t
decay into mere contempt for the manual labor that supports us – us, the
intellectual laborers:

Yet the refusal of statues and panegyricks to those who only
employ their hands and feet in the service of mankind may be easily justified,
I am far from intending to incite the petulance of pride, to justify the
superciliousness of grandeur, or to intercept any part o that tenderness and
benevolence which by the privilege of their common nature one man may claim
from another.”

Ah, but now the café where I am writing this is getting
crowded, and I want to go on for a few pages more. Maybe I will for tomorrow.

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.